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Captain Scott Kelly, the first American astronaut to complete a year-long mission in space, will speak at the Tolleson Lecture of the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016 in McFarlin Auditorium.

Kelly took flight on Expedition 46 to the International Space Station in March 2015. During his year in space, he helped lay the groundwork for the future of space travel and exploration. He also shared hundreds of pictures and messages with the world on Twitter and Instagram.

This historic mission also included a NASA study of twins in space: Kelly’s identical twin, retired NASA astronaut Capt. Mark Kelly, was stationed on the ground as a control model in an experiment to understand how space affects the human body.

Kelly earned his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York Maritime College in 1987 and a Master of Science degree in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1996. Before becoming an astronaut in April 1996, Kelly was a captain in the U.S. Navy.

Captain Kelly’s memoir, Endurance: My Year in Space and Our Journey to Mars, has been optioned by Sony Pictures and will be published in fall 2017.

All SMU community members are invited to the Turner Construction/Wells Fargo Student Forum at 4:30 p.m. in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom. Doors open at 4 p.m. Please tweet your questions for the forum to #SMUtate.

Tickets for the evening event are sold out. However, students can go to the basement of McFarlin Auditorium at 7 p.m. with their SMU IDs for possible seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

Poet and performance artist Sarah Kay – a writer, educator, and co-director of an organization dedicated to improving children’s lives through poetry – will visit SMU Tuesday, Jan. 25 to speak in the 2015-16 Tate Distinguished Lecture Series. She will speak at 8 p.m. in McFarlin Auditorium

Kay is a spoken-word poet who began performing in New York at age 14 at the renowned Bowery Poetry Club in the East Village. In 2006, she became a member of the club’s Slam Team and a featured poet on “HBO’s Def Poetry Jam,” as well as the youngest poet to compete at the National Poetry Slam in Austin.

In 2011, Kay created a sensation at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California with a performance of her poem B (If I Should Have a Daughter). The performance earned two standing ovations and has since been viewed almost 4 million times online via YouTube.

The poem itself has since been made into a short hardcover book, B, illustrated by Kay’s lifelong friend Sophie Janowitz, and has been ranked as the No. 1 poetry book on Amazon.com. An anthology of her works, No Matter the Wreckage, was published in 2014 by Write Bloody Publishing. Kay’s poems and articles have also been published in Pear Noir!, the Literary Bohemian, DecomP, Damselfly Press, Union Station Magazine, Foundling Review, the Huffington Post and CNN.com, among others.

All SMU community members are invited to hear Sarah Kay speak and answer questions at the Turner Construction/Wells Fargo Student Forum at 4:30 p.m. in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom. Doors open at 4 p.m. Please tweet your questions for the forum to #SMUtate.

Students can go to the basement of McFarlin Auditorium at 7 p.m. with their SMU IDs for possible seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

Shankar Vedantam, NPR science correspondent reporting on human behavior and social sciences, author of The Hidden Brain and former reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, will be the featured speaker at The Jones Day Lecture of the 2015-16 Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series on Tuesday, Nov. 10.

The lecture program begins at 8 p.m. in McFarlin Auditorium.

Vedantam is a science correspondent for National Public Radio, focusing on human behavior and the social sciences. He is the author of The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives, published in 2010.

Vedantam earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in his native India and a master’s degree in journalism at Stanford University. Before joining NPR in 2011, he spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post. From 2007–09 he wrote a column on human behavior for the Post.

Vedantam has served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and as a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He has been recognized with numerous journalism honors, including awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors, the South Asian Journalists Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and the American Public Health Association. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Tate Series’ 34th season also features the following events and speakers:

Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015 – Renowned director and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, creator of Baseball, The War and The Roosevelts; will give the Oncor Lecture. Currently, he is producing Vietnam, scheduled for release in 2017.

Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 – Spoken-word poet Sarah Kay, who began performing in New York at age 14, will lecture. The founder and co-director of Project VOICE, which uses spoken-word poetry to entertain, educate and inspire young students, Kay is also the author of two books of poems, B and No Matter the Wreckage.

Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2016 – Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, former commander, U.S. Cyber Command, and CEO and President of IronNet Cybersecurity; and Kevin Mandia, former computer security officer with the U.S. Air Force and president of FireEye Security with nearly 20 years in the cybersecurity private sector; will give the Omni Hotels Lecture.

Monday, May 2, 2016 – James Carville, Democratic political strategist who led Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, political commentator, author and professor; and Karl Rove, Republican political consultant for George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff; will give the Ebby Halliday Companies Lecture.

In 1985 at the age of 22, Kasparov became the youngest world chess champion in history. He played IBM’s Deep Blue computer twice in 1996 and 1997 and won the Linares super tournament nine times in 16 years. Kasparov made history when he won 10 major tournament victories in a row in 2002. That same year, he launched the Kasparov Chess Foundation to introduce chess into the education system, which operates in all 50 states and several countries.

Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005 after a record 20 years as the world’s top-ranked player. Following his retirement, he became active in the Russian pro-democracy movement and is the founder and chairman of the United Civil Front, a social movement that is a part of The Other Russia, an opposition coalition in Moscow.

As an author, Kasparov has published more than 20 books, including My Great Predecessors, which follows the history of the 12 world champions who preceded him, How Life Imitates Chess and, most recently, The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market.

SMU students may attend the evening lecture for free with their University ID if seats become available. Kasparov will answer questions from University community members and local high school students in the Turner Construction/Wells Fargo Student Forum at 4:30 p.m. in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom.

The Forum is free, but seating is limited. SMU faculty, staff and students are encouraged to attend; RSVP online to ensure a place. To ask Kasparov a question via Twitter, send a tweet with the hashtag #SMUTate. Student moderator Lauren Lyngstad will ask some of these questions during the event.